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Al-Ahram Weekly 23 - 29 September 1999 Issue No. 448 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 23 - 29 September 1999 Issue No. 448
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Comment Focus Special Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A question of security
By Mariz TadrosThe Interior Ministry has stepped up the war against thugs and hooliganism following the 4 September pen-knife attack on President Hosni Mubarak in Port Said. Mubarak's assailant was officially described as mentally unstable. But other reports said he was a well-known local thug. And yet others described him as an Islamist extremist. Since the failed attack, the Interior Ministry has rounded up thousands of thugs off the streets of Port Said and other cities and towns. The ministry also confiscated knives, swords, iron chains, sulphuric acid and pistols -- their favourite weapons -- and shut down workshops that manufacture firearms illegally.
Reports on acts of hooliganism cover a significant portion of crime pages in daily newspapers. And they are given greater prominence if the perpetrators do not fit into the traditional image of a thug -- the unemployed, impoverished, frustrated youth. MPs, businessmen, lawyers and doctors, as well as Arab royalty -- to mention but a few -- have all been implicated in hiring thugs to carry out "operations" for them.
There is a growing realisation that this is not the odd case of a fight or a brawl or even a social misfit. According to one estimate, there are 130,000 thugs on the streets of Cairo alone.
"It is a phenomenon which promises to become the biggest danger threatening our society. If a growing number of people turn away from legitimate and lawful ways of behaviour and defy the rules and regulations, then we are not living in a society; we will be living in a jungle," declared Ibrahim El-Nemeiki, deputy chairman of parliament's legislative committee. El-Nemeiki conceded that a bill enacted last year to combat hooliganism has not succeeded in checking the phenomenon. The bill makes hooliganism punishable by a minimum one-year imprisonment, with the penalty going up to death if the victim loses his life. A fight which broke out between two groups of thugs, hired by two rival businessmen, leaving 12 policemen and six citizens injured, prompted legislators to enact the bill.
"Legislation was supposed to be only part of the solution and not the whole solution. The principal reason behind this growing phenomenon is economic: the unemployment crisis, housing crisis, poverty, late marriages...All these factors are leading to an increase in violence," he asserted.
The absence of policemen from the streets has, according to El- Nemeiki, also encouraged the growth of the phenomenon. "The police have turned to ensuring political security, at the expense of the citizen's safety on the streets. There are some streets, in fact, entire areas, where you just don't have a policeman in sight. As for the villages, you also don't see a guard in sight, because the pay is so low. Thugs now rule the streets, harassing and intimidating people; they know they will get away with it, because security forces are just not there."
Newspapers have even published letters from citizens, addressed to the Interior Ministry, pleading for police protection. Some people, however, decide to take another course of action. "Some citizens who have lost faith in the security system hire their own thugs to protect them. The only way to confront this is to bring back policemen to the nation's streets," argued El-Nemeiki.
Ahmed El-Magdoub, professor of criminal law at the National Centre for Sociological and Criminological Research, believes that hooliganism has been on the rise because the government was late in confronting the problem. "With any crisis, the government seeks to pacify the people by passing laws and launching crackdowns, but it never really seeks to deal with the roots of the problem. It is the easy way out to pass a law to show the public that you are doing something about it and then wash your hands of the whole thing," contended El-Magdoub. He said that since the law is being consistently broken and thugs continue to be on the streets because the judicial system is so slow and prisons are overcrowded, alternative solutions need to be found. With social solidarity at an all-time low, especially among the affluent classes, thugs are now in high demand, El-Magdoub argued. "A thug, usually a young, unemployed, poor, illiterate man, lives in a shanty or slum area, but he usually works in the middle and upper class districts where people need his services to replace the rule of the law. Hiring bodyguards and security guards is basically a more sophisticated way of doing it."
El-Magdoub believes that hooliganism is also a violent expression of frustration and disappointment on the part of the poor against the rich, especially with the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.
But, warns prominent political writer Mohammed Sid-Ahmed, viewing hooliganism as another manifestation of the poor rebelling against the rich is misleading. Acts of hooliganism do not stem from, and are not restricted to, one class, but rather run across the entire social spectrum. "Describing hooliganism as a class phenomenon is distorting the issue and protecting those who are responsible for its most critical forms," he said.
Sid-Ahmed believes that the market economy helps the growth of hooliganism because it depends on free market mechanisms to regulate interactions and, in the process, ethics and morals are not always the rule of the day and there is a great temptation to cheat to get what you want. Hooliganism is a sign of social disintegration, because the social fabric of society is becoming weak, he said. Its proliferation attests to the fact that people believe that they cannot get what they want through legal and ethical means. Attempts to put an end to hooliganism in society by law and punishment are futile, he added.
According to Sid-Ahmed, "You can no longer trace back the origins of hooliganism and begin to address them; it has gone beyond that and become a thing in itself. It is an expression of the absence of a social contract; it is happening all over the place, and especially at the top social echelons, where there is the greatest need to fight it."
